International Writing Workshop II

Writing is fun because it involves thinking. In my last three essays, deepening my thinking was never easy for me, but at the same time, it had given me a lot of fun too. I had not taken my mind away from those essays, while, I was working , eating, walking, and even sometimes dreaming, I found that the activity of thinking give me some kind of magic to find something new and surprising in my essays. I was never good at English writing at all, but my likeness of writing never becomes less as it gives me opportunities to improve my writing skill at the same time thinking ability.

The first essay I wrote in last semester was on the topic “the Familiar Essay”. For this progression, I read, wrote and studied the art and idiosyncratic logic of “the familiar essay”. I learned to develop a complex idea, making use of one or more visual texts, scenes, images of experiences, and written texts – all of which will be used as evidence to substantiate my thinking about the idea. Like the entire Familiar Essay, I tried to draw from disparate experiences and texts in order to create a new complete essay.

In addition, I tried to create an essay that finds and follows its own logic through the various kind of evidence, which I can deliver into words. The second essay was on my favorite topic, which was “Reckoning and Reviewing”. I spent a lot of time on this one and the essay as a whole ended up as a surprise for me. For this progression, I selected an essay “Kriegel’s Falling into Life” that I find compelling. Then I read, “Kriegel’s Falling into Life” repeatedly as I wanted to figure out both what it means and how it means.

I tried to develop a rich, deep reading of this essay, analyzing its persuasiveness, rhetoric, and formal strategies, while at the same time putting it into conversation with several other thematically related written texts. I tired to write an essay that renders a rich, comprehensive understanding of my central texts, while also branching off from it to develop my own idea in an interesting, appealing and creative way.

My work to understand and assess my central text was not simply result in a rehearsal of the text’s points in order of presentation. Instead, my essay launched me into a far more invigorating inquiry – an inquiry that allows me to bring the insights and experiences that only you have to bear on that text. I learned from this progression to be reliable, creative, and comprehensive for my criticism, while also achieving “a life of its own as a way of understanding.

” This progression took me to the very heart of academic writing, intellectual inquiry, and general education, so I found what is at stake for me. The third progression moved closer to the academic end of the spectrum of essays. I tried to develop an intricate, persuasive essay about a controversy within contemporary culture. After that, I tried to read closely and reflect sensibly on the rhetoric and the content of a debate staged in public culture.

I analyzed how rhetoric works, on all sides of the controversy, through metaphor, images, and appeals to logic, emotion, and character. I also tried to strive to understand the underlying philosophical issues that inhere in my controversy, choosing one that inspired me the most and led me to research contexts that helped me frame the debate within a larger inquiry. My essay needed to voyage out beyond the controversy as I constructed this larger framework that allowed me to explore my own idea derived from my close reading of rhetoric.

In my final draft of this essay, I referenced ten different types of public sources from newspapers, journal editorials, essays that helped me to put the controversy in a larger context. In addition, I also used my own experience as evidence, but not as a way of avoiding careful, substantial, and playful engagements with written texts. From last three progressions (essays), I found a very interesting thing, which still puzzles me, but I really like to improve during this semester, which is to realize an embedded idea.

I often have a deeper idea while my essay is push further, but I cannot figure out myself for the most of time. I would really like to improve the skill on this, so I can start to see my essay as whole more completely. Writing essays is fun because there are so many things going on during every process and in each step. It is like our life, which involves complicatedness that made it more meaningful (not absolute, but necessary) and because of the complicatedness, our brain and thinking reach to a more advance level (not always, but most of time).